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Someone comes along to show Julian Fellowes how to waft his fingers across an iPad screen so that he can read his own story – a story that is making publishing history by appearing first, week by week, on a downloadable app.

The creator ofDownton Abbey sees neither shame nor contradiction in admitting that, technologically speaking, he is about as contemporary as a sugar shaker.

“It’s a cross between a novel and a computer game”, he says of Belgravia, his latest period piece set in the 1840’s about the tensions of love, money and ambition which go on behind the doors of London’s grandest postcode. The unravelling of the family drama is revealed across 11 weekly episodes which can be listened to via the website or the ground-breaking new app.

“I felt it was rather flattering to be asked to do this in my middle sixties – to be the adventurer forging through the undergrowth. It was such a change from Downton. But I’m not at all techno-thingummy. I can hardly work a tin opener. I have to ring my son [Peregrine, 25] about four times a day to find out why the computer suddenly said something. I think your brain at a certain point says: Enough.”

The 66-year-old brain of Baron Fellowes of West Stafford is much more agile than he pretends. It intrigues him to be delivering a weekly serialisation in the manner of Charles Dickens through 21st century computerised bells and whistles.

“You tune in and you see the real houses I use, Montacute House and Attingham Park, you can call up the family tree and if someone says ‘He died at Waterloo’ you can press Waterloo and get: “Waterloo was a battle fought on 18 June 1815….” I just rather love the idea of being the first to try it.”

Lord Fellowes is as sleek and beautifully polished as a billiard ball moving confidently towards its cushioned pocket. His perfect consonants and old-fashioned courtesy are of a piece with his pinstripe suit and splash of red braces but there is nothing crusty or ossified about him, least of all his views.

He scorns the objection that many refugees from Syria are just “economic migrants” wanting a better life. “Bloody hell, why shouldn’t they want a better life?” he demands hotly.

A sketch titled 'High Life, Belgravia'.Credit:
Getty

“They are trying to bring up their children and earn a living in a country that’s torn apart. There’s nothing for them there. They want to come somewhere where there is something. Who can blame them? Not me, I can tell you.”

But he loses patience with the “luvvies” who lecture Britain on its social responsibility to accept more and more migrants. “The prosperous, arty, liberal middle-classes weigh in, pronouncing on what we must do but they are not the ones to pay the price for their generosity. They won’t be queuing for dentists or doctors, or struggling to get their children into their first choice of schools or seeing their wages plummet because they are being undercut by the newcomers.

Fellowes is a novelist, film director, screenwriter and Conservative member of the House of Lords. Credit:
Rii Schroer

“It is facile to ignore all these fears simply because we bourgeois ‘haves’ are not going to be troubled by them. The people who are worried are not necessarily fascists or little Englanders but perfectly decent men and women with genuine apprehension.”

“I am potentially lazy and I need to be driven. Some people bounce out of bed and can’t wait to start working. I’m not like that."

The Conservative peer has outed himself as a Brexit man but declines to fan the flames. He hates to see his party divided against itself but believes harmony will eventually prevail. “I have lived through the fall of Heath, Heseltine and Westland, the ousting of Mrs Thatcher, Major’s Maastricht. Blood flows. People scream betrayal and faint in coils. Then… sure enough, it’s back to business. This will be the same.”

Fellowes ought to be sunning himself in the Maldives after creating a television drama that broke audience records round the world and made him the most bankable scriptwriter in the business. But instead of lolling on his Downton laurels, he is frantic with work.

His spirited adaptation of Anthony Trollope’s 1858 novel Doctor Thorne for ITV has just ended and he’s about to begin writing The Gilded Age for NBC, a sort of American Downton about fortunes made and lost in late 19th century New York, which he will also produce.

“I am potentially lazy and I need to be driven. Some people bounce out of bed and can’t wait to start working. I’m not like that. I work because I have to work – I promised such-and-such for the 17th and I’ve got to get it finished. That’s part of who I am.”

Although he’d had a busy “beta-plus” career as both actor (For the Greater Good,Aristocrats, and Kilwillie in Monarch of the Glen) and scriptwriter, he performed well below most people’s radar until he was 52. His screenplay for the country house murder mystery Gosford Park, directed by Robert Altman, was the real game-changer. “I am the tortoise from the fable of the tortoise and the hare,” he says.

A still from the Christmas final episode of Downton Abbey in 2015.Credit:
Nick Briggs/Carnival Films

Now last carriages have been called for the Crawleys, Fellowes can reflect candidly on the turbulence of being caught up in a “world phenomenon”. On the one hand, he is “immensely grateful for everything that Downton did” – not least it financed a sweeping restoration of his Grade II-listed manor house in Dorset, a project that had been proceeding in fits and starts. The builders have only just left after four and a half years.

“You also need to be Attila the Hun with a skin as thick as a trunk. I did find the personal attacks quite hard. It was like a cat playing with a vole.”

“Downton was a lovely adventure. We were on this incredible magic carpet ride. It was an extraordinary experience and when I’m old and dying it will be one of those things I remember and bore my grandchildren with.”

But by the second series, Fellowes was coming in for regular brickbats from the press. Alleged anachronisms were noted with glee. He was accused of being a snob, obsessed with table etiquette such as how people should hold their knife and fork, tip their soup plate or fold their napkin – matters on which he has never pronounced and couldn’t care less.

His wife [Emma Kitchener, a great-great-niece of Lord Kitchener and a royal lady-in-waiting] was considered fair game, too, and he was – still is – incensed about a newspaper attack on his mother who had died 30 years earlier.

“They seemed to think: How can I be as nasty as possible about this man? And fundamentally, what was my sin? My sin was to have written a hit show. That’s where I do rather lose it.”

The insults wounded him more than he admitted at the time. “As a writer, you’re supposed to be this incredibly sensitive person picking up every nuance of human behavior,” he says. “Yet you also need to be Attila the Hun with a skin as thick as a trunk. I did find the personal attacks quite hard. It was like a cat playing with a vole.”

Though he was stung by the nitpicking about alleged historical inaccuracies (“They would assume that the complainant was correct and the programme was at fault, whereas it was in almost all cases the other way round”), he eventually realised that it was better to be sniped at than ignored. “As my mother would say, ‘They are the right problems.’”

Fellowes says he has a “vague and rather sentimental belief” that most people are trying to do their best and are not malicious – even his baddies “have some kind of motivation you slightly understand” – but he was shocked and puzzled to discover that “there could be horrible, horrible people” whose primary motive was to make others unhappy.

“I am completely up for a film. It would be fun, like raising our glasses to six good years.”

Gareth Neame, executive producer of Downton, describes Fellowes as a considerate, thoughtful man who always has the right words for a colleague in crisis. But professionally, he is exacting (“a my-way-or-the-highway man”) and, at his worst, bombastic.

His great skill, says Neame, is writing with aplomb about romantic love, tapping into an unacknowledged universal longing for something subtler than cut-to-the-chase sex. “His Downton characters contain different aspects of his own personality,” says Neame, “but I think Robert Grantham is the man Julian would really like to be.”

Both men hope there will be a film of Downton Abbey. “I am completely up for a film”, says Fellowes. “It would be fun, like raising our glasses to six good years.” Fellowes makes no grand claim to have rebooted the costume drama genre for British television – though he has.

“That’s not part of it for me. If people enjoyed their Sunday nights for eight weeks every autumn, that’s enough. I’d like to feel I could do that again. Maybe not in the same cars-skidding-to-halt-on- Fifth-Avenue way but, you know, I think it’s still possible. In this industry you’re just trying to be undisappointing.”

Belgravia, by Julian Fellowes, launches on 14 April 2016. A free app containing the first episode will be available to download from Google Play, iTunes or via www.julianfellowesbelgravia. com. A further 10 episodes will be released weekly. Each can be bought for £1.49 or on subscription for £9.99.